WASHINGTON – A new bombshell Sexgate book alleges that President Clinton personally warned Secret Service chief Lew Merletti to keep his agents from talking to investigators about the president’s “women.”

The book says Sexgate prober Kenneth Starr got a tip from a top official in the Secret Service about the alleged marching orders from Clinton – and that led to the fierce battle between Starr and the Clinton administration over whether agents should be forced to testify in the Monica Lewinsky investigation.

Sources say Starr was told that Clinton had called Merletti into the Oval Office and told him to have his agents brush up on the meaning of “executive privilege” and to tell the agents to keep quiet about any “women.”

At the time of the alleged meeting in January 1998, Clinton and Lewinsky were trying frantically to keep their secret affair from coming out in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment lawsuit.

Jones’ lawyers had put Lewinsky on their witness list, along with several other women linked to Clinton – and they wanted Secret Service records that might corroborate the affair.

The blockbuster book by two reporters who covered the scandal arrives as remnants of Sexgate continue to dog Clinton legally.

The president filed a sealed response yesterday to an Arkansas legal panel threatening to revoke his law license because of his lies about Lewinsky in the Jones case, sources said.

Sources said Clinton is fighting to keep his license.

The federal judge in the Jones case found Clinton in contempt for lying, fined him $90,000 and referred her finding to the disbarment committee.

That panel could vote as soon as next month on whether to revoke Clinton’s law license in Arkansas.

The new Sexgate book, written by Washington Post reporter Sue Schmidt and Time reporter Michael Weisskopf, is highly anticipated.

The book is likely to gratify Starr’s defenders but infuriate the White House – especially because Starr’s prosecutors cooperated with Schmidt, the first reporter to get the Sexgate story into print.

The book, “Truth at Any Cost: Ken Starr and the Unmasking of Bill Clinton,” is due out next week – but Time and The Washington Post are set to run stories on it earlier.

Besides the allegation about Clinton and Merletti, who left the White House in 1998 to become security coordinator for the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, the book documents the all-out effort by the White House attack machine to smear Starr and his aides.